Stories, Plays and Other Writings by Carson McCullers, edited by Carlos L. Dews. Library of America, 667 pp., $40.00
Complete Novels by Carson McCullers, edited by Carlos L. Dews. Library of America, 827 pp., $35.00
The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr, with a foreword by Tennessee Williams. University of Georgia Press, 600 pp., $39.95 (paper)
Too readily classified, or dismissed, as a Southern Gothicist, Carson McCullers (1917–1967) is one of the most radical writers of the American mid- twentieth century. Among, for instance, her female contemporaries, a remarkable gathering that includes Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, and Shirley Jackson, it is McCullers who dared to take on sexual taboos, violated heterosexual conventions, and refused to punish her characters for…
